May 25 Spicy Vegetable Pasties

Pasties are the perfect convenience food. Their shape and size make them ideal to carry around when you need to grab a bite on the move or better yet, a lazy picnic in the park. Incredibly versatile, you can fill them with almost anything you fancy and they taste as lovely cold as they do fresh from the oven.

1. The pastry needs to be at room temperature, keep in its packaging but remove from fridge and set aside. Heat the rapeseed oil in a frying pan and add the sliced onions. As the onions start to soften and go translucent add the courgette and ginger.

2. Whilst the onions and courgettes are frying, boil the potatoes until they are cooked through. Allow to cool then chop them small enough to put in your pasty! In the same boiling water add the garden peas for a few minutes and drain.

3. Add the potatoes and peas to the onion and courgette pan then add a few splashes of water to losen the mixture up. Next go in the spices (turmeric, curry powder, paprika) stir to ensure everything is covered adding a little more water if needed to stop it sticking to the bottom of the pan.

4. Once the onions and courgettes are cooked through and everything has been coated in all of those delicious spices, set aside for 30 minutes or until it has completely cooled down.

5. Heat the oven to 190 °C. Lightly flour a clean surface and unroll the pastry. It needs to be a few millimetres thick so with a rolling pin roll it out a little more. This will not only make it thinner, it will make the sheet bigger. You can make a paper template of a circle measuring 12 cm in diameter and use this to cut out the pasty discs.

6. Beat the egg in a small bowl and brush this along the inside edge of your pastry disc. Take a small handful of the now cooled mixture and place it on one half of your disc and ensure you leave a 1cm edge. Fold the disc in half so the the filling is now enclosed, it should now look like a capital D and with the back of a fork, press the edges together. You should have enough pastry to make at least 4 with some filling left over. ( I added a tin of chopped tomatoes to the filling cooked this through and served with rice!)

7. Lay the pasties on a baking tray and brush a thin layer of egg yolk over them before putting in the oven for 30-45 minutes or until golden brown.